You'll probably need to do all of the above and some more to model the character, the best thing to do would be to practice, play with the tools and see how they work then you will be best able to assertain which ones to use. Here's a list of some poly tools that I use frequently... Split Polygon Split Edge Loop Extrude Face Extrude Edge Merge Vertices Extract Combine Append Poly Booleans I would suggest looking at some modelling tutorials too, Mike McKinley's done a Cartoon Dog tutorial that you can download for free from this site, it covers a bunch of those tools and will probably help you out quite a bit.